Day of the dad

The reason technology is now so prone to misuse and abuse, the experts tell us, is because the rate of change is so swift that the rest of society cannot keep up. As quickly as some bright new invention is introduced, someone else works out a way of perverting its intended purpose.

And so a man is discovered snapping pictures on his mobile phone in a courtroom, rogue states are caught extracting weapons-grade uranium from power plants, and my family swiftly realises that I didn't just buy a pair of noise-cancelling headphones last week in order to filter out the sound of aircraft engines.

These magic twin flowerpots are the craze of the moment, confides the man behind the counter at Manhattan's biggest electronics store. After the New York Times recently lavished praise on a new, reasonably priced pair, the store received 260 orders in 24 hours, he added.

I know air travel is becoming more and more aggravating in the US, but that's an awful lot of New Yorkers suddenly bothered by engine noise, the principal use that manufacturers usually cite for such products. Ohhh, he said, there are other sounds they cut out. His accompanying conspiratorial smile was completely unnecessary - I knew they did. At least, I assumed they did.

I assumed there were some potential applications that noise-cancelling headphone makers feel it undiplomatic to mention on the side of the box.

After all, while I do spend considerable time flying around America in noisy little planes, I spend even more sitting at a computer desk in the main room of our apartment with my back turned - but, sadly, my ears open - to the cacophony of my family in full flow.

Surely nobody would take it too personally if I tried to cancel a bit of that engine noise, too. It wasn't as if I'd be bricking myself into a separate room. Out of hearing, out of mind, perhaps, but I could easily take them off and re-engage with the family. Occasionally.

I let my wife try them. "Mmm, it's a rather weird, dislocating experience," she said. "It's slightly like entering another world." Exactly, I replied, now give them back. I hadn't quite expected the children to be as enthusiastic about sonically dislocating me as I was about sonically dislocating them.

No more unseemly interruptions to their screaming matches by their father, they thought. And lots of potential for speaking their mind about me without me hearing a word. "Why don't you wear your headphones?" said Joe, trying to be helpful, when I asked him to turn the music down. Well, for a start, because I'd already discovered that noise-cancelling headphones don't cancel everything.

Belatedly, I looked at the packaging blurb, which says "each earpiece listens for ambient noise and creates a signal that cancels up to 85 per cent of that noise". Ambient noise is background noise, a woolly term.

Does it, for instance, include the sound of wooden building bricks being dropped slowly and systematically on to a polished wooden floor? Or the sound of Pete Seeger's American Folk, Game and Activity Songs for Children playing on the next room's CD player for the 22nd time in a day?

For the first and, hopefully, last time in our partnership, I asked the children to run through their repertoire of annoying noise so I could test the headphones' capabilities. They were happy to oblige.

And so, not very scientifically, I have concluded there is little that modern audio technology can yet do about the averagely pitched scream of the five- to seven-year-old.

The 'phones actually made it sound more piercing by removing all the other noise. (However, interestingly, they worked far better later on, when my two little helpers were having a proper fight; so perhaps sounds are easier to cancel out when they're made with genuine feeling.)

The noise of the baby mewling vanished completely as soon as I donned the 'phones, but only because their comical appearance stopped him in his tracks.

But aesthetics are obviously not an issue. I continue to wander around the home wearing the headphones, mouthing silent responses to the children whenever they say something annoying.

Naturally, I haven't been stupid enough to pass on the somewhat disappointing results of my research. Not being able to hear them would have been fun, but pretending you can't hear them has its own appeal.